To make intelligent decisions over complex data by discovering a set of interesting options is something that has become very important for users of modern applications. Consequently, researchers are studying new techniques to overcome limitations of traditional ways of querying data from databases as top-k queries and skyline queries. Over the past few years new methods have been developed as Flexible Skylines, Regret Minimization and Skyline ordering/ranking. The aim of this survey is to describe these techniques and some their possible variants comparing them and explaining how they improve traditional methods.